Roan St. John

Roan St. John lives in Central America, dividing her time between Guatemala and the mountains of Costa Rica. After a high-profile career in the entertainment industry and years as an entrepreneur, she turned to journalism, writing for the digital magazine Neotropica. Today she devotes her time to research, writing, and photography from her small finca.

Her first novel, Blind Reason, was originally published in 2002 under the name Patricia Griffon and later revised and re-released under her current name.

She is the creator of the Expats on the Isthmus series, a darkly satirical thriller set in a fictional Central American country where paradise is a product and truth is negotiable. Drawing on extensive travel and firsthand experience throughout the region, the series explores land fraud, corruption, intelligence operations, and the uneasy relationship between foreigners and the countries they claim to love.

Her protagonist, journalist Maya Warwick, learns that survival in paradise depends on understanding its rules—especially the ones no one admits exist.

When she isn’t writing, Roan travels throughout Central America, gathering the stories that inspire her fiction.

She is currently at work on the next Maya Warwick novel. Paradise always has unfinished business—and endless stories, because there is never a shortage of people willing to believe the brochure.